Cooking for one

Can anyone recommend “cooking for one” type cookbooks? My mom has decided that that’s what she wants for Christmas, so I need help kind of fast. :slight_smile: The recipes need to be fairly simple with no exotic or hard to find ingredients.

Thanks!

I don’t have one to recommend, but I do have one to UNrecommend: do not get The Pleasures of Cooking for One by Judith Jones. Her recipes are all basically “make twice as much as you’d really eat (or more), and then cook the other half again to turn it into another meal later”.

I don’t need to buy a cookbook for that stunning revelation. I do need a cookbook to scale down recipes for one serving.

Also, about one-third of the recipes seemed to involve organ meats. bleah

Heh, that’s the book I came in here to recommend. I dunno, I think you get the best meals out of making a lot and then re purposing them for totally different meals, and she’s got some great ideas, stuff I wouldn’t think of.

But yeah, it’s probably not the book for someone who wants simple recipes. Her recipes are really good, but not necessarily simple. More geared towards the person who lives alone, is retired, and likes to cook.

Peg Bracken had at least one section on cooking for one in one of her cookbooks, but I can’t remember which book it was. It’s not the Updated and Revised edition that came out recently. There’s some good recipes in that one, but most of the recipes make more than one serving, and don’t scale down well. If a recipe calls for a can of condensed soup, you know damned well that the other portion of the soup will go bad before you get around to using it.

It’s still a pretty good cookbook, though.

I have “The Compleat I Hate To Cook Book” by Peg Bracken right here and there’s a chapter, “Cooking If Alone”. (There used to be three or four IHTC books, but they are out of print, and most if not all of her recipes are compiled into “The Compleat”…). I think they’re good (if mundane) recipes, too, and if you are cooking for one, well, throwing away a half can of soup isn’t going to break the bank.

I was looking at this one on Amazon… no mention of organ meats! Thanks for the warning, Mom would definately not go for that!

Not quite on-topic but one I thought of is The One-Burner Gourmet which has recipes for more than one person, but all of which can be cooked on a one-burner camp stove. Quite a few creative recipes in there.